Articles

# 8, April 2005

 David MacFadyen (University of California, Los Angeles)

  Literature Has Left the Building: Russian Romance and Today’s TV Drama

I’m already 83 years old and scared I won’t make it to the end of your TV serial.  Please tell me a secret…  How does it all end?

Of all our arts [today], the TV series is the most important.[i]

Introduction

In Episode Four of Dmitrii Mednov’s Side by Side with Love (Parallel'no liubvi, 2004), an outrageously affluent businessman (and gubernatorial candidate) is publicly embarrassed.  He has been slowly falling in love with his female campaign advisor and this evening must face her mother across a small dinner table.  An imposing matriarch (Lidiia Fedoseeva-Shukshina), she immediately takes him to task for knowing no literature, especially after he admits ignorance of Aleksei Tolstoi’s Road to Calvary—the novel’s heroines provide the names for both the advisor and her younger sister.  Shukshina’s harangue does not abate and so the businessman tries to defend himself.  He fails, but this type of fault-finding is so familiar to the daughters that the youngest interrupts her mother in order to stop some tediously familiar phrasing:

— Have you read Dostoevskii?

— Yes, I have.  Not much, though, ‘cos I work a lot.

— Well, that’s not much of an excuse, young man.  You have to read the Russian

classics.  If all politicians and businessmen would read the Russian classics…

— …then we’d all live a lot better.  Russian literature teaches people morality.

Although the daughter sighs at this tirade, the mother’s point remains serious.  It comes, to boot, from the real-life spouse of a famous Soviet writer.  What is television, literature’s nemesis, doing by telling people to read literature?  And what exactly is being dragged from the nineteenth-century, all the way through the Soviet experience, and then offered to the oligarchs of today?  “Morality”?

The heroes of Soviet literature, in both historical and ideological senses, are often referenced seriously and ironically in Russian TV series.  Television is remembering, quoting, and, in some senses, saving the literature that society’s movers and shakers don’t know very well.  Yet TV does so by keeping people away from libraries and on their sofas.  Romantically-driven and melodramatic television series show this strange process best of all, with the kind of caring, cultured and morally upstanding social bonds that allow producers and directors to rummage around in the past.  These broadcasts can mine the metaphors of socialism (parenthood/brotherhood/family/love), thus keeping the “social” yet dumping the “ism.”  They show kindness in a cruel society and do so by leaning heavily on the structural workings of the narratives they most resemble: serialized novels of the nineteenth century.  Pre-Soviet forms and Soviet morals dovetail to counter the savagery of post-Soviet marketplace corruption (especially among rich men who don’t read Tolstoi).

Though the following text focuses upon the importance of love stories, it also maps out some common ground with Elena Prokhorova’s research on detective series in the Soviet Union under Brezhnev.  This connection with her work is possible since her study synthesizes (and then foreshadows) certain issues of pertinence that implicate a productive overlap between socialist tradition and the start of the twenty-first century.  One of her key tenets is that “Soviet television of the 1970s made Soviet narratives and icons polysemous.”[ii]  My recent monographs on socialist song and prose classics concluded, in a comparable spirit, that their “Sovietness” came from what journalism or socialist academe said about them, rather than what they described in reality (that is, prior to policy’s crude redefinition of their “true purpose”).  Politicians frequently needed (polysemous or) apolitical adventure stories and pop songs, say, in order then to create telling, promotional metaphors of social cohesion.  Those reworked metaphors could turn little love songs between two people into oratorical bombast applicable to two hundred million.  Stories of total forgiveness and acceptance (amid love, family, trusted friends, or nature) were things dogma needed and employed, yet could not enact—they were excessive.

This undoable, traumatic excess would (and will) not go away any time soon, since the Brezhnev years were calm and trouble-free (if we speak with Russian notions of relativity).  The 1970s are, therefore, a fruitful period for the nostalgic directors and viewers of today.  That decade’s serene socialist populism avoids generic obsolescence for yet another reason: criminal series of thirty years ago involved more than just crime.  As Prokhorova notes in her forward-looking finale, many of the detective shows that grew from the traditions of the 1970s were generically muddled, producing such re-fashionable combinations as the “police procedural/sitcom [or the] gangster saga/male melodrama.” [iii]  The aim of my paper is to investigate the nature and workings of these stubborn, ever-enjoyable mélanges.  How do so many long, drawn out stories wander back and forth between genres, decade after decade?  What, in particular, can we say about the endurance of their romantically “impure” elements that ultimately provide the metaphors of cohesion or construction long after any criminal has stopped being subversive?

Television series tell the most important stories in Russia today.  Stylistically tainted Russian TV is now churning out 75 series a year.  This is an amazing yield, considering that as recently as 1999-2000 only 5% of nationally broadcast series were made domestically.  One continuity discernible in this changing, snowballing situation is that detective dramas still outnumber melodramas, yet what—purportedly—is central to those criminal stories is “the crisis of the [modern, Russian] family as an institution.” [iv]  Love for one’s nearest and dearest is still drawn upon by screenwriters left, right, and center.  The business of showing families’ breakdowns (or uncertain renewals) in an entertaining fashion now commands a joint production budget of $150,000,000 per annum.  This figure has been reached with particular speed since the start of the new millennium.  In 2001, the cost of shooting all TV serials nationwide had been $40 million; by 2003 that total had risen to $70 million—and thus doubled in twelve months alone.  This escalation will not stop, either.  Industry experts suggest that Russia’s television networks could hypothetically support 6,000 hours of broadcast drama per annum; currently the massive output outlined in this introduction constitutes about 3,500 hours per annum.  Expect even more series very soon….  Not surprisingly, the market leaders amid all the hustle and bustle are the channels ORT, Rossiia, and, in third place, NTV. [v] 

The rather lazy tendency to joke about Russians watching episodes of Santa Barbara in primetime is now very obsolete. [vi]  Seven years ago, the cost of showing an episode of Santa Barbara fluctuated between $12,000 and $14,000.  The advertising revenue from initial broadcast and (limited) subsequent repeats could bring up to $50,000 in revenue.  A handsome profit, by any standards, but everything changed in August 1998.  The nation’s government announced its intent to default on overseas debts and nationwide financial collapse ensued with alarming rapidity.  Buying foreign serials was suddenly too expensive an enterprise, yet herein lay the chance of a lifetime for Russian serial production.

Television heads in Moscow now saw that it cost the same to film one episode of a soap in Russia as it did to buy an episode of some US equivalent, but a home-made product could be repeated endlessly (outside of the restrictive repeat-viewing clauses in US contracts), sold to somebody else, turned into a cheaper sequel, or subsidized from the outset by product placement.  It likewise became clear to Russian feature-film studios that making one hour of television drama would cost them 50% less than 60 minutes of footage destined for the big screen.  Suddenly it made sense to make TV, not purchase it.  The cost of producing an episode today can vary greatly, however, between $30,000 and $100,000, so this story of geographical shifts (from Los Angeles to Moscow) will also be one of greatly varying quality as the ability to make TV goes head to head with the desire to make it cheaply.

Thus began the television series as we know it today.  This article will examine the role of long, televised serial narratives and the ways they have—despite all accusations of being cheap, tawdry entertainment—not only done extremely well for themselves, but have also adopted many aspects of the treasured literary tradition in Russia (which has, by all accounts, long been abandoned by today’s excessively faddish novelists).  If you want to experience classic Russian storytelling, walk away from the library, go home, and turn on the TV.

  Soviet Beginnings and a Mexican-Brazilian Finale

How did television series even come to Russia?  This remains a tricky issue, since argument continues over how lengthy, serialized “television films” of the past relate to the television series we know today.  What is the difference between a long film in four parts and a series in fourteen?   If we take the most inclusive view possible, then the granddaddy of them all is often said to be Bringing Fire upon Ourselves (Vyzyvaem ogon' na sebia, dir. Sergei Kolosov) of 1963-4, recorded at Mosfil'm and commissioned by  Gosteleradio.  This stirring tale of WWII spy Ania Morozova and her escapades with Polish resistance fighters was broken into four episodes (96, 76, 77, and 68 minutes).  Ironically, as state television then tried to satisfy the public’s manifest desire for this type of lengthy “Russian” story, Mosfil'm would gain benefit from real-life Polish and Bulgarian colleagues, too, as budgetary constraints obliged Moscow to borrow Polish TV series (A Four-Man Tank Crew and a Dog [Chetyre tankista i sobaka, dir. Konrad Natecki, from 1965] and A Risk Greater Than Life [Stavka bol'she, chem zhizn', dir. Andrzej Konic, 1967]).  Issues of sufficient financing were solved with admirable speed, though.  Over 1967 and 1968, for example, 113 TV films were broadcast on the Soviet small screen.  Central Television also oversaw the birth of Èkran, an association responsible for many classic serialized films of the 1970s.  These included adaptations of the Anatolii Ivanov novels Shadows Vanish at Noon (Teni ischezaiut v polden', dir. Valerii Uskov and Vladimir Krasnopol'skii, 1971 [TV]/1974 [cinema]) and An Eternal Summons (Vechnyi zov, dir. Valerii Uskov and Vladimir Krasnopol'skii, 1973), together with the most famous of all espionage dramas The Seventeen Moments of Spring (Semnadtsat' mgnovenii vesny, dir. Tat'iana Lioznova, 1973).[vii] 

1  A Four-Man Tank Crew and a Dog	2  The Seventeen Moments of Spring	3 Experts Are on the Case

        Almost simultaneously, a more modern-sounding detective series had been planned: Experts Are on the Case (Sledstvie vedut znatoki, multiple directors) that debuted to immediate success in 1971.  Here, grand and more typical themes, such as Siberian villages under Soviet power or WWII anti-Fascist activity, were avoided.  Popular wisdom tells us that the series’ genesis can be traced to the late 1960s, when the writers Aleksandr and Ol'ga Lavrov were asked to help create the drama at Mosfil'm, in part because the studio’s director had himself once been a prosecutor.  The Lavrovs were already well-known for their regular publication of courtroom transcripts in the pages of The Literary Gazette (Literaturnaia gazeta).[viii]  This combination of fact and fiction was a hit; the resultant series would spawn 22 episodes, the last of which was broadcast as late as 1989.[ix]

4  The Rendezvous is Set	5 Mikhail Boiarskii as D’Artagnan in D’Artagnan and the Three Musketeers

  The parallel and truncated format of “extended television films” (or shorter proto-series) would also blossom in the same period, most notably in the melodramatic Gypsy (Tsygan, dir. Aleksandr Blank, 1979) over four episodes (100, 80, 80, and 85 minutes), together with The Rendezvous is Set (Mesto vstrechi izmenit' nel'zia, dir. Stanislav Govorukhin; five episodes) in the same year.  Soon to be canonized with equal verve in the 1980s were the Boiarskii-heavy swashbuckling adventures D’Artagnan and the Three Musketeers (D’Artan'ian i tri mushketera, dir. Georgii Iungval'd-Khil'kevich, 1978; 80, 65, and 75 minutes) and the trilogy spawned by Svetlana Druzhinina’s costume adventure Midshipmen, Onwards! (Gardemariny, vpered!, 1987; 80, 70, 65, and 75 minutes).  In today’s civic memory, these have walked side by side with a five-film Sherlock Holmes series directed by Igor' Maslennikov between 1979 and 1986, itself fluctuating between feature-film and episodic formats.  The 1980s are also punctuated by a neat consistency in the ten, seventy-minute episodes of TASS is Authorized to Report (TASS upolnomochen zaiavit', dir. Vladimir Fokin, 1984).[x]  The emphases sketched here—history, (admired or envied) foreign models, detective work, and a struggle with classic literature—would continue to be important.

Many TV films and similar series, however, neither generated exceptional interest nor produced profit.  As socialism shuffled inelegantly from the world stage and international awareness grew after the mid- to late 1980s, Soviet models of television drama began to look woefully old-fashioned.  Indeed, within two years of the final Sherlock Holmes film, bold and brash Mexican or Brazilian soaps would appear, purchased en masse by Russian channels.  They created serious, if not overwhelming, competition for the initial post-Soviet series Goriachev and Others (Goriachev i drugie, dir. Iurii Belen'kii, 1992-94) or The Little Things of Life (Melochi zhizni, dir. Viacheslav Brovkin, Gennadii Pavlov, and Aleksandr Pokrovskii, 1992-1995).

In fact it would take several years for Russian studios and TV stations to plan a counterattack against Latin American melodrama.  Even in the late-1990s, under pressure from post-default economic restraints, more audacious and parsimonious executives at ORT decided it was acceptable to slice both An Eternal Summons and Shadows Vanish at Noon into 52-minute episodes.  Each hour could thus accommodate eight minutes of primetime advertising.  This ruse allowed ORT briefly to outpace viewing figures for Timothy Dalton and the American series Scarlett (1994), but it was hardly a long-term solution, even if it did show the potential validity of home-made serials amid primetime foreign competition (after 7:45 pm).[xi]  Any rehashing of old broadcasts was also a long way from what studios really wanted to do: make new, respectable shows and avoid undignified pandering to market pressures.  Even today, the head of a hugely influential TV production company in Russia has admitted, “the more television series adapted from novels written by classic writers, the better.”[xii]

RTR, hoping the canon would make them money, had already manufactured two recent and “classic” adaptations of Dumas’ La Reine Margot (Koroleva Margo, dir. Aleksandr Muratov, 1995-96) and La Dame De Monsoreau (Grafinia de Monsoro dir. Vladimir Popkov, 1997), ventures that leaned heavily not only on broad French shoulders and the printed page, but also on the admired Soviet Musketeer serials—themselves a jumble of swashbuckling theater, romance, and nationally-famous songs.  Almost concurrently, an even more staid—yet cheaper—project appeared: The Secrets of St. Petersburg (Peterburgskie tainy, dir. Vadim Zobin, Mark Orlov, and Leonid Pchelkin, 1994-1996), based on Vsevolod Krestovskii’s novel Petersburg Slums.  This attempt at nineteenth-century respectability displayed little of what commentators nowadays call the “nationally specific or homey” features that epitomize so many Russian serials.[xiii]   Hence, complaints continued unabated about pointless television series from the US, while these types of more “literary” narratives buckled under the weight of sun-soaked Latin broadcasts.

Spanish- and Portuguese-language drama came to Russia thanks largely to the equally exotic, Bulgarian-born French distributor Dino Dinev.  Unable to convince Russian Central Television that they would adore his 300-kilogram box of Mexican video cassettes, he agreed to let the Russians broadcast the first five episodes of The Rich Cry, Too (Bogatye tozhe plachut [Los Ricos También Lloran]) for free.  Only when studio heads at Ostankino saw sacks of cheery viewer-mail that had literally reached the ceiling, did they invest in the soap on a long-term basis.

  6  Veronica Castro

The Rich Cry, Too debuted the first of its 249 episodes in 1992.  Originally scheduled for once-weekly showings on Saturdays, it was soon broadcast five days out of seven.  Love came to town.  The show’s star, Veronica Castro, claimed on a 1992 visit to Russia that her heroine “knows how to fight for her happiness.  Maria is both a woman and a winner.”[xiv]  These clichés surrounding feisty, full-bosomed Latin types started to have serious consequence in Slavdom.  The 150-episode Simply Maria (Prosto Mariia [Simplemente María]), itself based upon a 1967 Argentinean serial of the same name, enjoyed equal success, growing from a simple premise: the tale of a peasant girl who moves to a big city, where she finds love, money, and adventure—beginning with an accidental pregnancy.   Castro herself saw nothing formulaic in this and other plots, though: “I was attracted to the series because it touches on complex, multifaceted problems, the most important of which is the love of a middle-aged woman for a younger man…  In Mexico, at the start of the twentieth century, that would have looked like a real challenge to society.”[xv]

At the end of that same century it seemed that only established and yet innovative Soviet directors could save Slavic television studios from the challenge of torpor.[xvi]  The strategies regarding any kind of comeback were well documented by The Independent Newspaper (Nezavisimaia gazeta) in its weekly polling of politicians, public figures, and regular viewers vis à vis the best, worst, or most memorable TV broadcasts of the past seven days.  We can hear discontent from the very outset: “All those Latin American serials and soap operas are quite simply the stupefaction of society.”[xvii]  The kingpins of late Soviet culture were not happy with the alternatives available at home, either: “I can’t call the [Russian] serials great works of art.  They’re pleasant enough, but they’ve got really primitive screenplays that always hinge on some kind of cruelty—and a requisite criminal component, too” (Georgii Danielia);[xviii] “I get irritated by the actors’ constant lisping, by all those sentimental women’s serials, by the disrespect shown among young people, by their appalling speech and incredible arrogance” (Aleksandr Kushner).[xix]

For all this prohibitive grumbling, the Brazilian soap Isaura the Slave (Escrava Isaura)—already shown to great acclaim in 79 nations—about the abolition of slavery, had scored a massive home run in Russia with its fusion of historical fact, exotic locales, undying love, and moral propreity.[xx]  The floodgates were open: a deluge of Brazilian serials marked the first few years of post-Soviet life: Seniorita (Sen'orita [Sinha Moca], broadcast in 1992); My Love, My Grief (Moia liubov', moia pechal' [Meu Bem, Meu Mal], broadcast in 1993); The Sweet Spring (Sladkii ruchei [Riacho Doce], broadcast in 1993); Full-Moon of Love (Polnolunie liubvi [Lua Cheia de Amor], broadcast in 1994); and The New Wave (Novaia volna [74.5 Uma Onda no Ar], broadcast in 1994).  Between 1999 and 2001, this influence was still profitable—seventeen Brazilian series were scattered across the networks.[xxi]

Where could Russia look for long, historical narratives of its own?  Logically to literature (again), maybe even to tales that themselves celebrated the cultural primacy of words.  Nabokov’s The Gift, Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, and Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago were advocated in 1999 by one journalist at The Banner (Znamia) as suitable material; by pleasant coincidence Russian serials were starting to enjoy their first serious market share at this time.  The same columnist, however, wanted works by great writers, not about their lives.  TV could not handle that lofty subject: “A novel about a novelist is truly a core element of twentieth-century Russian culture … of high culture.  As the hero of a soap opera or serial, a Russian writer will be dull.  You can’t hang anything on that kind of figure except outdated ambitions …  New Russia can’t garner its identity through the figure of a writer, of literature.  It can’t repeat or clone some old, nineteenth-century or Soviet notion.  It’s historically pointless.  It’s a dead-end.  It’s a Mobius strip that Russia can never escape from.”[xxii]

One of the biggest problems of cultural escape was the inability of early Russian series in the 1990s to look sophisticated, a predicament caused by little cash, “cheap screenplays, cheap direction, and cheap camerawork, too.”[xxiii]  Only very recently would things change: “I find myself rejecting those foreign series.  Lately I’ve been watching our Russian TV series with pleasure.”[xxiv]  This single and subjective opinion can be easily contextualized with more objective data: in 2002, Russian TV dropped Santa Barbara in order to free up space for domestic dramas. Two soon-to-be important production companies—A-Media and Phoenix Films—were simultaneously born.  Likewise, if in 1999 Russian series occupied less than 10% of primetime line-ups, as noted, by 2001-2002 they claimed 46%.[xxv]  The slowly vanquished time-slots of 19:30 (on RTR) and 20:55 (on NTV) allowed homegrown dramas to outperform both E.R. and Walker: Texas Ranger.  NTV even had the audacity to place two domestic serials back-to-back in the evening slots—and, to the amazement of all concerned, they bumped ORT’s national news broadcast (Vremia) into second place.  Dizzy with the anticipation of sudden profits, RTR crammed six new domestic series into its schedule within three months—and radically increased its market share as a result, from 4% to an occasional 25%![xxvi]  Every channel sat up, dreaming of advertising revenues that prior to the default had been climbing at annual rates of over 30% per annum, reaching $520 million in 1997—a figure then slashed to $190 million by 1999. 

Tempting Slavs Back to the Living Room with Literature

Actors, however, were not keen to jump on the bandwagon.  Being typecast or stuck in one role for several years following the success of a given series concerned many artistes and they often shied away from cut-rate television; even today most productions are filmed on video and fall short of the purportedly high benchmarks established by Soviet TV.[xxvii]  So how would thespians, especially the big stars, be attracted to homemade television, to work for the typical Russian viewership, 51% of which is female, 49% male and on average 38 years old?[xxviii]  A pivotal figure in this objective was Aleksei Slapovskii, a self-acknowledged fan of An Eternal Summons and The Seventeen Moments of Spring, who authored the screenplay for Request Stop (Ostanovka po trebovaniiu, dir. Dzhanik Faiziev, 2000 and 2001).  Centered on a down-to-earth story of two modern couples, one hardworking yet somewhat naïve and the other fiscally brutal, the series was praised for building upon the traditions of Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears (Moskva slezam ne verit, dir. Vladimir Men'shov, 1979), Winter Cherry (Zimniaia vishnia, dir. Igor' Maslennikov, 1985), and The Irony of Fate (Ironiia sud'by, dir. Èl'dar Riazanov, 1976).  Of course, for all the praise, there would be a fair share of lingering discontent from some quarters.  Killjoys claimed the show reflected (and enjoyed) a modern social dilemma, often bemoaned by Russian households—or at least by the husbands:

In our society today an intellectual shift is taking place; it’s probably connected to parallel shifts in the financial world.  Men and women are swapping social roles.  If aliens ever watched this TV series, they’d conclude that men on Earth are the weaker sex.  These men trail after the main heroine and all want something from her: love, money, or a child.  But she, being proud and independent, chooses the weakest of them all…  She courageously “adopts” the infantile hero and hopes to make a real man out of him.  Anybody among you who wishes to repeat this exercise should be wished good luck and reminded of what happened to Frankenstein.[xxix]

Love stories could not be told as before because families had changed too much.  Slapovskii deliberately wrote Request Stop to counter all the increasing “detective shows, action stories, and other nonsense.”  Instead, it would offer a new tale based on human nature, rather than loud adventure.[xxx]  Here, in this and related TV projects, there resided a different notion of community, the strains of a patriotism that’s “simple, like a lowing sound.”[xxxi]  Yet despite these accusations of simplicity or sad, inverted binaries, it was occasionally asserted that the simple structural opposites of Mexican soap operas (be they ethical or gender-based) were actually instigating a desire among Russian viewers for something more intricate.  “People got tired of silly conflicts between some heroine—with her soul of sterile purity—and innumerable villains that surrounded her while they plotted in various wicked ways.”[xxxii]  Love should, therefore, be somehow traditional, nationally specific, and complex at the same time.

If Slapovskii’s “Russianness” could avoid cookie-cutter simplicity, it might find good company amid the claims of Valerii Todorovskii (TV drama chief at Rossiia) that visual episodic narratives are worthy inheritors of Chekhov’s oeuvre—whilst feature films are more “Tolstoian.”  Agreement is heard at other TV stations today.  Todorovskii’s counterpart at ORT, Dzhanik Faiziev, says today’s TV drama is now made of compound or mixed genres—which is by no means a failing, for “human stories [thus] transpire.”  Neither life nor love is simple.  Faiziev quotes the tragicomedy Kramer versus Kramer (Robert Benton, 1979) as a good benchmark for modern and multi-generic storytelling.  Transferred to Russia, the resulting hero from such stories, say executives at STS, should be “strong, pleasant, attractive, and able to give people a good dose of optimism.”[xxxiii]

The recent adaptation of Dostoevskii’s The Idiot (dir. Vladimir Bortko, 2003) for Rossiia is perhaps the best example of this problematical shift from literature to something local, newer, and “attractive.”  The series’ DVD box-set of 2003 maintains that inside is the “first version of the novel in world cinema based on utmost fidelity to the original text.”  In a draft article discussing this project, [xxxiv] Konstantine Kliutchkine of Pomona College has remarked that the producers, over and above their respect for the words of the original, also wanted to avoid any costume drama burdened by material objects—by an exacting fidelity to furniture or interiors of the period.[xxxv]  He also notes that the series straddles two disparate periods of TV production.  Conceived and constructed between 1999 and 2003, it was imagined during the heyday of Latin American serials but appeared during the renaissance of domestic shows.  What Kliutchkine calls the “willful archaism” of The Idiot on TV is as much a deep bow of respect before the Brazilians as it is a nod towards Dostoevskii.

   7  The Idiot

Here the issues of well-spoken status, cheapness, and profitable familiarity are all rolled together.  Director Vladimir Bortko said: “You can call The Idiot a detective story—and probably a melodrama, too.  It was written just like a soap opera for newspapers.”[xxxvi]  The newspaper Russian News (Rossiiskie vesti) likened the series to both Soviet detective dramas and the modern mystical show Beyond the Wolves (Po tu storonu volkov, dir. Vladimir Khotinenko, 2002; see below) because it stresses love and other familial elements within its criminal plot.  The same paper also maintained—simultaneously and in contradiction to Bortko—that the broadcasts are “an attempt to create a domestic show different from Latin American family sagas, with all their muddled family relationships between relatives.”[xxxvii]  But how convincing was this claim to self-respecting socialist culture or the leather tomes of its libraries if foreign TV was a frequent point of reference (if only in order to outdo it)? 

Elsewhere, the Idiot adaptation was called, more accurately, “a detective story of feelings”[xxxviii] and this definition helps to clarify matters.  The series realizes certain affective and Brazilian elements that are novelistic.  As Kliutchkine writes:

Like the [Latin-American] telenovela, The Idiot focuses on passions and suffering in the context of family relations and relies on criminal subplots.  Similarly to The Idiot, telenovelas explore the combination of national and human values, often setting their narratives in a vaguely pre-industrial past.  Staple fare in telenovelas, oppositions between demonic and spiritual men as well as loose and honest women also fashion the character structure for Dostoevskii’s text.  Finally, the telenovela is a highly theatrical genre relying on rigid camera work, long close-ups of the actors’ faces, theatrical sets and incessant relationship-talk, all features central to the aesthetic organization of The Idiot.

In a land where nobody reads novels any more, their structure and social intentions remain, working hard and finding much in common with Latin soaps.

Money aside, another reason that The Idiot borrowed from Brazil was that prior to the Russian TV renaissance, domestic shows merely leaned on socialist clichés (or reedited classics) in order to “console millions of people in the absence of new values and norms.”  If news broadcasts were designed to “explain that we’re alive, then serials should explain why we’re alive.”  New Brazilian soaps were already the logical heirs to the narrative structure, heroes, and ethical (depoliticized) tenets of the past; those heroes were worthy of Viacheslav Tikhonov.  They could be compared to “Shtirlits [from The Seventeen Moments of Spring] or to the heroes of [Aleksei] Batalov and [Iurii] Nikulin.”[xxxix]

Serializations, both on Brazilian television or in 19th-century publishing houses, leave big gaps between segments and increase the audience’s role in collaboratively creating meaning.  Serialization turns a straightforward narrative into a better form of social glue.  If extended over a long period of time, the punctuated storyline may start moving in the direction of a soap opera—where desire is never satisfied and nothing ever ends.  Serials, however, do end (eventually) and therefore operate between coherence and diffusion, between satisfying a hope or desire and the more aimless business of desiring, pure and simple.  The size of this fluctuating social group is, of course, often financially determined, just as is the length of a serialized novel. 

The same logic can determine the size of social units being shown on screen, too—that is, the groups of characters who create groups of willing and empathetic viewers.  Here again the stripped-down look of The Idiot comes into play.  Scenes usually center on two or three people, being cheaper to shoot than outdoor, action-based footage.  “Although clearly economically determined, this interiority [on US television] enhances daytime’s ‘women-centered’ atmosphere since its dyadic structure and familiar setting necessitate a primarily emotional and interactive, rather than action-oriented narrative…  The sets are not hermeneutically crucial in themselves, as they are in cinema.  Soaps focus on what characters say to one another, not where they say it.”[xl]  Elena Prokhorova has likewise suggested that earlier, detective dramas of the 1970s were driven by dialog, not action;[xli] the experience of watching today’s retrospective, respectful, and emotional TV is often structured by cash and cultural mining.  So with all these influences in the creation of emotional melodramas—money (from advertising and profiteering), the Soviet tradition, Latin telenovelas, the big screen, and, last of all, the unassailable prestige of “the novel,” can any kind of thematic rubrics be suggested? 

Some Categories of Russian Romantic Television

1: Historical

Poor Nastia (Bednaia Nastia, 2003)

The grandest series in this category, from a purely financial point of view if nothing else, is the nineteenth-century costume drama Poor Nastia (dir. Ekaterina Dvigubskaia, Petr Krotenko, Stas Libin [nature scenes], Alla Plotkina, Aleksandr Smirnov, and Petr Shtein).  Its producers announced with considerable hubris that after the series’ presentation in Los Angeles, it would be purchased and displayed in thirty countries, including Greece, Spain, and—ironically or triumphantly—Latin America.  The reasons for success on this scale are multiple, but interestingly enough the director of A-Media, which produced Poor Nastia (together with the hit adventure series The Brigade [Brigada, dir. Aleksei Sidorov, 2002]), said recently that filming the past is always simpler than filming the present.[xlii]  Looking back at history (which already makes sense) is easier than looking around and making sense yourself.  

8 Cast of Poor Nastia	9 Elena Korikova as Poor Nastia

Convinced of this argument, foreign backers quickly appeared to fund the Tolstoian, touristy clichés they expect from Slavdom.  A-Media was joined by Columbia Tristar Pictures (who brought Santa Barbara to Russia) and Sony Pictures.  Much money was spent and many tools were borrowed or bought to the tune of $11,400,000:[xliii] forty-two tons of equipment delivered from overseas; two central sound stages measuring 2,600 square meters, plus fifty-two additional sets; frequent travel to (and use of) more than fifty outdoor locations; eight hundred costumes; six directors; thirteen screenwriters and a final screenplay of 9,600 pages, giving voice to the 7,200 people in fourteen cities who passed through casting [xliv]  The resulting, passionate epic stars some of the prettiest (yet jarringly modern) faces working in television today: Elena Korikova, Daniil Strakhov, Petr Krasilov, and Dmitrii Isaev. [xlv]

Despite being set further in the past than any other series in this article, Poor Nastia claims an emotional relevance in the present:

1839: History is moving forward, but human feelings do not change.  Love and jealousy, honor and envy, fidelity and disloyalty prevail.  Aging Baron Korf has raised Anna as his own daughter.  He dreams of watching her on the stage of the Imperial Theater.  The beau monde of St. Petersburg undoubtedly sees great talent and a great future in Anna.  But very few people know that she is a peasant girl. Prince Mikhail Repnin fell in love with Anna from the moment he set eyes upon her; he, too, is ignorant of her background.  Will Repnin be able to preserve this love when Anna’s secret is revealed? [xlvi]

These complex social dilemmas and concomitant emotions required 120 episodes to work themselves out.  One of the directors (Petr Shtein) drew consciously upon Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939) to remind him of the “beautiful, powerful blockbuster” he sought for viewers. [xlvii]  Similarly, the screenwriters wanted to shape Poor Nastia not as an American broadcast (that is, structurally open-ended in case of good ratings and a second series), but as a complete work with “beginning, middle and end,” since that—allegedly—is what Slavic audiences want.  In structuring the tale, the American members of the team were surprised that their European colleagues expected a screenplay based on “historical fact,” not social gossip or faux mysticism.[xlviii]   “The serial includes a lot of real people and many of the events that made the nineteenth century so rich.  To show how carefully the writers related their text to historical truth, we worked with an expert historian and an authority on the history of fashion.”[xlix]  In somehow juxtaposing objective, past reality with the affective power of the narrative, the latter was co-opted into the former: “A fairytale is falsehood, but this falsehood must be counteracted by truth.”[l]  The producers expressed their intent to prejudice the ostensible, “objective” aspect of their endeavors.  The Idiot shied away from ostensible reality, but Poor Nastia fosters it.  We can sense already a major dilemma; even when some of the characters, like Prince Repnin, were the product of screenwriters’ fantasy, journalists went to great effort to prove other individuals had “really” existed with the same name and in some cases were documented by Karamzin.  “Repnin is not a real historical personage, but the creators of Poor Nastia were no doubt trying to ‘connect’ him to that well-known family line.”[li]

In a similar spirit, some columnists offered their readership endless facts and figures from the series’ given period, all in the name of a “truer” context.  I have already mentioned the year 1839, when “the Winter Palace was rebuilt after a major fire; monetary reform was begun, resulting in a system based upon silver; the Pulkovskaia Observatory was opened and Lermontov finished the final version of his narrative poem, The Demon.”  Some of those facts may be relevant, but others were not: “At the end of 1839, somewhere between the towns of Vladimir and Moscow, a foreign traveler came across a colossal elephant surrounded by a cavalcade of horses.  The elephant was a present from the Persian Shah to Nikolai the First.”[lii]  The documentary evidence was excessive, an issue peculiar to the Russian series and to which we shall return later.

Another local problem emerged when the Americans discovered Russian writers were not used to pacing the acts of any given episode so that advertisements would fall into the rhythm of the work, punctuating it with minimum intrusion.[liii]  Likewise, given the very unusual, unwieldy size of the series, some actors—as noted—worried they would be typecast in this unusually long drama,[liv] others that poor ratings would mean being “written out” of the plot by death or accident.[lv]  A third oddity was the American pace of work.  All the technology mentioned above meant that “normal” US production speeds could be met: one day per episode.[lvi]  Perhaps the filming schedule would contradict all possible artistic benefits of a huge budget: “Speed’s only a good thing if you’re hunting fleas!”[lvii]  Dmitrii Isaev conflated these problems of artistry and speed when he compared the project with a marathon, but the physical labor of each day to filming a one-act play: “Each day’s a premiere, an exam.”[lviii]  Another of the actors (Daniil Strakhov) admitted that only valerian drops, vodka, TV, and computer games allowed him to “switch off” mentally each evening.[lix]

Poor Nastia is indeed a huge, rambling tale on the Tolstoian scale of feature films.  In a similarly Tolstoian manner (this time from Anna Karenina), viewers said that burying a loveable heroine in the middle of so many episodes led to confusion; the series was named after a young woman who often seemed to be absent.  What on earth was going on?  Just as readers of a serialized romance in the nineteenth century, TV viewers today pondered all possible social relations or combinations in future episodes as hypothetical equations: “Anna + Vladimir Korf = ?”; “Anna + Mikhail Repnin = ?”  In attempting to simplify these matters, the most fundamental question of all was posed: “What does Anna want?  Love.  A real, radiant and all-consuming love.”[lx]  Vanishing in a huge plot and falling into love were supposed to mirror each other: “Do You Like Vanishing into the 19^th Century?” asked the promotional materials.  Is that movement invisibly affective or theatrical?  “Gorgeous costumes and sets.  How could they not make you happy?  Every little girl dreams of waking up in a place like that.”[lxi]

  Bless the Woman (Blagoslovite zhenshchinu, 2003)

Other big historical dramas of late have been set in the twentieth century, but one in particular is notable for its costumed scale, like Poor Nastia.  Bless the Woman is the work of Stanislav Govorukhin and has two hypostases, as both a television series and a feature film.

The heroine’s life is shown against the backdrop of actual events in Russia’s  history, all the way from the 1930s to the 1950s.  Together with her husband—a  soldier—she travels the nation, trying to find the kind of happiness sought by any woman.  All of this takes place during times of repression, war, and social breakdown after the hostilities.  Only when she returns to her hometown near the sea many years later does the heroine find, at long last, peace and quiet in her soul.

[This and all subsequent excerpts printed in italics are from promotional DVD synopses.]

The movie debuted on August 27, 2003―designated as Russia’s “Cinema Day”—and then opened simultaneously in 50 regions around the nation as part and parcel of celebrations to mark the end of WWII many years prior.  Somebody was keen on making a big fuss with a big story across a big time span.  If complex, peripatetic plots might be a marked category of historical melodramas today, then what of the condensed movie version?  Can the big TV series be abbreviated?  The newspaper Izvestiia said it had enough plot lines to match the 1,128 episodes of Santa Barbara.  The television version had a novelistic structure; the feature film, however, could handle neither the scope nor the full extension of any ideas contained in the serial.  

It was feminine and it was loved.  The film was dedicated “To Our Mothers and Grandmothers.”  Govorukhin also declared openly in many interviews that he even modeled the heroine on his own mother.  Yet this overt referencing of actuality did not stop further criticism of warmed-over Soviet plots and outdated views of how the opposite sex should love.  His vagrant heroine, thrown from embrace to embrace, town to town, reminded some viewers of the actresses from An Eternal Summons, and his gendered views of trustworthiness continued to raise eyebrows.  “Perhaps an ideal woman should be like Govorukhin’s: fidelity to the grave, and then a new love will come to her as a reward.  Perhaps Govorukhin wants to believe that kind of theory. In one interview he said he makes ‘anti-cinema’ or, if you like, cinema to counter modern cinematography.”[lxvi]

Some of the younger women writing in soap forums were less than satisfied with Govorukhin’s “anti-cinema” or his ideas of love:

What the hell is kind or humane in this “masterpiece”?  You all write about poor women [here in the forum].  The husband almost wipes his feet on his wife, and that’s about the extent of his kindness.  I’ve lived with that type of unstable spouse―and I can tell you there’s nothing beautiful in it…  There’s no need to “bless this woman” in all her suffering and call it family life.  You should save women from suffering.  Films like this leave the younger generation with the reassurance that, as in the past, a wife is a free domestic laborer, a cook, laundry maid, housemaid, cleaning woman, nanny for the kids, and a passionate lover after the work day.  It’s all so phony![lxvii]

Poor Nastia and Govorukhin wished to erase the line between fact and fiction with grand, extraordinary storytelling, but did so unnaturally or artificially.  The distance between extraordinary and ordinary was sometimes too great.  

The Red Choir (Krasnaia kapella, 2004)

The series The Red Choir (dir. Aleksandr Aravin) hoped to fix these problems of phony romance or national and generic fidelity by basing the script on both upon well-known historical events (in this case Soviet espionage work in wartime France) and by taking much from the spy drama Seventeen Moments of Spring.  Even the mother of the serial’s chief actor, Andrei Il'in, said her son plays a better spy than Viacheslav Tikhonov’s Shtirlits in Seventeen Moments.[lxviii]  Viewers’ chat forums drew the same parallels between the private and the public, between the micro- and macro-political, in that the show’s love affairs mirrored yet outdid political allegiances.  “The film is amazing.  It’s absolutely the right thing to do, showing WWII and secret agents through the prism of human interaction…  We could do with a few more films like that, so young people could see cinema about their own history instead of endless, gory action flicks.  I’m so glad that Russian cinema is coming back.  Keep it up!”

The episodic historical film The Red Choir resurrects the traditions of the Russian spy series.  Moreover it’s an objective look at the work of secret agents during World War Two.  On the other hand, viewers will also see the chief organizers of the Red Choir not just as professional agents, but as vivid characters, too―people who never abandon their perfect compassion for others.

12 Viacheslav Tikhonov as Shtirlits in The Seventeen Moments of Spring	13 The Red Choir	14 Cast of The Red Choir

The series centers on the real-world adventures of Leopold Trepper (codename Jean Gilbert) who had been a Soviet agent in Paris―though the producers, as in many Soviet dramas, sometimes use Riga as a mock-up for the streets of France.[lxix]  The choice of this story is interesting, given that Trepper was Jewish and rewarded by the Soviets for his priceless espionage work (which perhaps sealed victory at Stalingrad) with ten years in prison. [lxx]  The Red Choir quickly starts looking like an act of atonement reminiscent of Bless the Woman.  Its producer, Valerii Todorovskii, first had the idea of making the film fifteen years prior, yet just like the team who built Poor Nastia, he had no doubts about its contemporaneousness.  “This is a modern story.  The series we’ve made is also modern, and that’s really important.  Of course there were [past] prototypes and real people behind all of this, but nonetheless it’s a flight of fancy.  It’s a work of art, not a documentary.  The series was made to tell people a powerful story, to excite them.”

Some people were excited very quickly.  During filming in Paris “proper,” an elderly émigré roller-skated up to the crew and was told the film was about Trepper.  He skated up to Il'in, peered at his face and declared: “Looks like him.”  He then zipped off.[lxxi]   The director addressed these thin lines between fact and fiction, between individual and epoch.  In doing so, he slightly contradicted Todorovskii, thus blurring those lines even more:

Of course there’s an element of fantasy.  But most of the heroes, together with the basic events in their lives, are strictly documentary.  The characters act under their agents’ names, not their real ones, so we have the right to at least some artistic imagination.  Leopold Trepper himself used several names; one of them was Jean Gilbert and that’s what he is known as for the entire series.  And there’s his fundamental protagonist, too, a Gestapo officer—basically the man who broke the Red Choir wide open.  He appears under his actual name.[lxxii]

The one surviving member of the Choir, Anatolii Gurevich, was tracked down by the newspaper Izvestiia late in 2004.  As a real person watching a story that claimed to remake or explicate the actual experience of many people, he likewise found himself stuck between reality and ropey fiction, especially because he hated the negative portrayal of his (relatively) minor figure in the screenplay: “I just can’t see the series as anything artistic; it’s all tied too closely to my life.  I can’t relate to it as a historical work, either.  Not only because Kent (that’s my codename) is shown as a traitor.  It’s simply unbearable to see characters, my colleagues’ prototypes, in such primitive and silly stories.  I’m sure even the most naïve of viewers―who doesn’t know the historical context―will get the impression the Red Choir were a bunch of dilettantes.”[lxxiii]

Very many viewers said they were reminded of Soviet TV series and were glad The Red Choir was “free of all that ideology in Stalinist espionage films…  The characters are defined not by class consciousness but by universal humanism.”[lxxiv]  Gurevich, however, remained upset and penned an article, saying The Red Choir had more in common with the “style of James Bond” than the day-to-day tedium of spying (a quotidian emphasis nonetheless represented on occasion by antique-laden sets).  “What do we get at the end of the series?” asked Gurevich.  “Having taken real events and distorted them beyond recognition, the screenwriters have depicted a different life and different people.  The film’s creators didn’t meet with me (they knew that I’m still alive!).  They took it upon themselves to depict my life as they saw fit; the life of my comrades according to the authors’ daydreams.” [lxxv]  Gurevich’s supporters found time and space to voice the same bitter views on a state intelligence website.[lxxvi]  In representing history, the filmmakers had ignored the people who constituted it.  One overarching, post-Soviet idea appeared to be ignoring the “human facets” it declared to be saving.  People were less important than personalities; the idea of camaraderie overshadowed the actual comrades.  What of a purely literary bond, of fictitious lovers under Stalin, rather than Hitler?  

The Children of the Arbat (Deti Arbata, 2004)

The same passions seethed around the TV version of The Children of the Arbat (dir. Andrei Èshpai), even though sixteen years had passed since its publication (in essence the same period over which The Red Choir had kept its “contemporary relevance”).  The director said: “The political aspect of the novel might look a bit naïve today, so it wasn’t that important for us.  The characters’ destinies were much more significant; they haven’t aged at all, not even today.  We felt it was time to tell the story of one individual’s ability to keep things together in an appalling period; the ability to maintain a clarity of vision in freedom’s absence—to hold on to sincerity and some degree of self-worth.”[lxxvii]  Anatolii Rybakov’s novel of absent freedoms had been translated into 52 languages after its 1987 publication and the producers matched that scale with modern means: The Children of the Arbat cost approximately $300,000.  It included location work in Paris, Moscow, Tver' and Nizhnii Novgorod.[lxxviii]  As in The Red Choir, politics were supposedly sidestepped in favor of the personal:

The series takes place between 1934 and 1943.  It is a story that will lead the audience into the Kremlin’s offices, through the atmosphere of communal apartments, into both university auditoria and prison cells.  The Children of the Arbat will acquaint viewers with the life and daily routine of a Siberian village, with the towns of Russia’s provinces.  It ends with tragic events at the start of the Great Patriotic War.  The heroes of this tale are down-to-earth boys and girls from Moscow’s Arbat, together with people at the very pinnacle of political power: Stalin and his entourage, Soviet workers, the leaders of academic institutions and of grandiose construction projects.  This trilogy tells of all these people and of their spiritual worlds; it outlines their personalities and worldviews in a period that would become hugely significant for Russia’s destiny.

 Èshpai, despite his experience with the silver screen, was convinced that television could handle this scale by memories of his teacher at VGIK, Tat'iana Lioznova, who had made Seventeen Moments of Spring.  Musings on David Lynch’s Twin Peaks (1990) likewise persuaded him that TV could also maintain a sufficiently grand, cinematic quality.  In an interview with the magazine TV-Park, he repeated his disavowal of the political content that once made the narrative so famous:

Re-reading the novel today, I understood the most interesting thing is the interaction between the upper strata of political control and simple human destinies. Just think: so many lives were destroyed by one person’s will, by the movement of an eyebrow, an interjection or a throwaway phrase.  The theme of internal freedom among people “at the bottom of the pile” is very important here …  The thing is, though, that freedom is hard to preserve nowadays, too, when individual choice―you’d think―actually has a wider range of options.  That’s why Rybakov’s characters are relevant now, just as they were then.[lxxix]

Something today is as nasty as it was yesterday and it threatens both families and lovers.  Èshpai credited the generation of the 1930s and 1940s with a greater willingness to “interact” or socialize candidly than in the present day, when all is deceitful ostentation.  TV could show the extent of that emotional openness in the face of malice.

Loftiness and chronology aside, Sukhanov also had trouble with the transformation of his face.  He does play Stalin in a very disturbing manner, all slouches and accented mumbling; the plastic skin covering his visage mirrors the theatricality of his “Georgian-ness.”  Though scheduling required that he work quickly towards the end of general production, he (with equal speed) admitted the unpleasantness of wearing a synthetic face overnight and, therefore, returned to more traditional (that is, slower and expensive) techniques: three or four hours each day with the make-up artists.[lxxx]  Subsequent critical assessments compared him unfavorably and unfairly to the most famous Stalins of Soviet cinema.

And so a troubled love story was ready to come to television, having waited 21 years to be published―and 38 years to be televised.  Despite all this attention to historical detail, it had hoped to move away from stressing Stalin alone.  The series’ producer, Andrei Kamorin, again drove home this point, lest we forget: “To say that Children of the Arbat is about Stalin is like saying that War and Peace is about Napoleon.”  A desire to preserve the narrative and emotional breadth of the work for love meant that this TV drama should not shrink in the presence of cinema’s actual breadth; the small screen needed to establish its own cinematic emphasis on detail (focus) and feeling (an atmospheric or ineffable “air”) to claim the literal scale of a big screen synecdochically: “From the very outset we tried to maintain a cinematic language, no matter how hard it’d be.  I think we were successful in creating the atmosphere and characters of a movie.  I’d never make a serial that didn’t have the air of a feature film.”[lxxxi]  Failure, said Kamorin, would come if focus swamped feeling, if history swamped sympathy for the little people who made it—and if the work was wrapped up in some pretension towards “a first-class Forsythe Saga with a ‘nod’ from the BBC.”[lxxxii]

With Stalin in place, though (as just one man, not an entire dogmatically-burdened saga), could the fantasy of little people go to work?  With a hopefully convincing socio-political counterweight, micro-political stories could perhaps proffer better versions of its workings.   How, then, did viewers react to the depiction of faithful lovers Sasha and Varia (Evgenii Tsyganov and Chulpan Khamatova)?  Some contributors to online TV forums noted a lyrical fluidity across sixteen episodes that managed to outpace the figure of Stalin altogether.  One love story used and then dispensed with the politicking of one leader: “I love relaxing[!] to the series.  It’s so easy to watch—no effort at all.  Things always finish in a way that you want to watch the next episode.”[lxxxiii] 

Yet dissatisfaction, on the other hand, occasionally emerged whenever a historically (contextually) accurate mood was totally absent.  Some emotional states and their depiction were felt to be too modern.  Something was being redone, and faultily.  Several of the young people playing Komsomol members, for example, were called “hooligans”: “It’s there in the book, in black and white: ‘Open faces, radiant eyes.’  But here there’s nothing except cynicism or really bad overacting.  Where can you find any other kind of face today, though?”  The “faces of young people today, in 2004,” were no happy alternative, but “there’s nothing you can do about it…”[lxxxiv]  The ongoing, spirited need by a TV station to emphasize a generation’s passion led to overkill with the music, too, because “music [always] dictates a viewer’s feelings” and the sound engineers were a bit overbearing.  Emotionally, then, there might be problems whenever history was totally suspended, but at least the show looked well-funded and had its heart in the right place; at least it was “basically well filmed.  And without promoting all that kind of American chernukha.”[lxxxv]  It was respectful.

When all was said and done, literary reputation had inspired a series dedicated to the maintenance of that reputation.  In addition and consequently, Children of the Arbat expressed that respectful desire in a hopeful representation of reality as realia (as a physically similar dictator, promised by the producers).  The actors do much to struggle against that archaic emphasis, though, and push love to the forefront—in particular Khamatova, who together with Tsyganov enacts in the series’ closing episodes one of the most impassioned scenes of love in recent Russian drama.  The life-threatening danger of maintaining private (in fact, often illegal) passion in a time of public, objectified fervor is so feral in its expression that the cameraman can barely keep up.  Bodies throw themselves against bare, hollow walls with such disorder that the resulting shots of Tysganov and Khamatova give voice to people more beaten than loved, an image that comes back to haunt us in the very last frames.  Can the feeling ever escape the physical world, be contemporarily relevant and yet not look false?  

Two Fates (Dve sud'by, 2002)

Perhaps the best example of a romantically-driven TV drama that did not draw upon classic literature or fact, but nonetheless aimed for an emotionally absorbing, cinematic sweep in Russia’s twentieth century was Two Fates (dir. Valerii Uskov and Vladimir Krasnopol'skii).  It takes a step further away from Soviet (shared, remembered) actuality than Children of the Arbat in that its love stories are set in Soviet contexts, but employ those contexts only indirectly. 

16: Poster for Two Fates

The closing reference here to things national may make us cringe in anticipation of more politics, but the fates of Vera and Lida (Ekaterina Semenova and Anezhelika Vol'skaia) are very clearly foregrounded.  The series dragged some people away from socio-political reality with dramatic consequence, especially in a couple of Belarusian villages.  Three times in a row, as locals sat down to watch Two Fates, a building somewhere nearby caught fire.  The cause of the fires remained a mystery, though some people thought that nouveaux riches were using the empty streets during a very popular show to burn down houses—and then buy the land cheaply.[lxxxvi]   Based upon two popular novels by Semen Malkov, Ransom (Shantazh) and Retribution (Rasplata), the broadcasts clearly contained enough successfully chosen elements to keep villagers indoors and produce Moscow investors willing to fund a second series.  In today’s blurb for those future advertisers, we hear about “dramatic intrigue, dynamic action, and romantic conflict.  All of this excites readers from the very first frames of the series.  Semen Malkov, a delicate psychologist and linguistic master, has drawn the world of our contemporaries with unusual focus and brilliance.  This all finds voice in the screenplay’s details and skillfully crafted dialog.”[lxxxvii]

At the center of the film are two tales of two women [Vera and Lida]. These village girlfriends in the early 1960s have their lives ahead of them; they are both young and beautiful. The Party’s regional representative starts courting Vera seriously; Lida is not short of male attention, either. It seems their destinies are thus decided for many years hence. But everything is changed by the arrival of a specialist from Moscow, Stepan. Seeing him for the first time, Vera understands that this is love. Lida decides to use her chance [that is, to manipulate Stepan] and move to Moscow. As so often happens, a friendship between women is ruined because of men. These complex, interwoven predicaments start unwinding in totally unpredictable ways. Masks are removed, revealing the truth―and thus pulling more and more new characters into a whirlpool of events. Our heroines cherish both their dreams and their love through many years. Their private lives develop both dramatically and unexpectedly against the backdrop of the nation’s complex destiny.

17: Two Fates

Investors were no doubt pleased to learn that the screenplay was written by Valerii Uskov and Valdimir Krasnopol'skii, who had brought Russia the airline drama Beyond Jurisdiction (Nepodsuden, 1969), plus Shadows Vanish at Noon and An Eternal Summons, mentioned earlier.[lxxxviii]  Succumbing, however, to the sad, swift “rhythm” of TV work, Uskov and Krasnopol'skii were by now pumping out two complete drama series per season, including the lengthy Nina (2001), discussed below.  Some viewers sensed the spirit of a TV Taylorism: “It looks like a cheap woodcut with all the signs of some weepy Mexican serial transferred to Russian soil…  The characters’ experiences are so contrived, all the way from their love affairs to your obligatory historical chronicle that’s stuck in from time to time (Afghanistan, the Putsch, etc.).  It’s nothing more than ‘serial feelings’ and it moves like a typical serial through the plot lines, too.”[lxxxix]  Despite this complaint, the show does prove that viewers will happily watch romance dramas according to criteria other than historical realia, other than period costumes, plastic faces, or the right furniture.  This is absolutely crucial.

If looking real is so important to producers, though, how much money is possibly left to fund quality screenplays and sets, in particular when the best-known thespians can take home $5,000 per day?  Ratings (as always) have to be considered, since every percentage ratings point today means more cash from advertisers tomorrow.  By way of example, a series with a miserly one-percent share can command $2,000 for a 30-second commercial.  A show with a 10% share over a one-hour episode can bring in $300-400,000.  An “encore showing” the next morning will conjure more cash still, as of course will later videos and any subsequent sale of the show in toto to another channel.  What does not manifest itself today is a large amount of scripts, hence another reason for the fuss over Uskov and Krasnopol'skii.  Perhaps because television screenwriters often receive little for their work (and so much is being spent on spectacular verisimilitude), TV stations are repeatedly obliged to screen a large percentage of the material offered them by studios, material that is―as we know―itself produced under time constraints.[xc] 

Stations need primetime series like Two Fates, but even if they order them (that is, if they order precisely what they want), channels habitually cannot fund those dramas to a desired “spectacular” level because they make money from advertising when (that is, after) the serials are shown.  This logic suggests that a rough period could be overcome if investment was offered in the short term.  Indeed, three years ago (in 2002) TV advertising brought in $900 million.  By 2003 that figure rose to $1.3 billion and estimates for 2004 have suggested $1.78 billion.  As money appeared, the production of TV series did not slow down—and the funds needed to “guarantee” a higher quality for future projects started coming in.  But it seems so far that nobody in the living room cares that much about “quality.”  The emotional aspect of scenarios needs to be historically accurate, not the costumes, domestic interiors, or make-up.

If so, maybe the success of the cheaper romantic melodramas (the success of thoughts and feeling over objects and locales) suggests there is no need to make classy detective and action serials all the time?  Some chat-room pundits certainly thought so, but wondered how an emotively-driven, often “pure” heroine might relate to the varnished figures of prior prose.  In other words, if perfect people are more important than perfect places, does that not start to sound a little reminiscent of prior, varnished decades? 

This tradition [in Two Fates] of depicting the hero in social-psychological terms has become daily bread for Russian viewers. Even if it looks a bit schematic, it is about those viewers’ lives. It helps people to get their bearings in very troubled times. Looking at these heroines, though, I suddenly recalled that I was never very fond of [socialism’s] positive heroes. It’s so strange to see almost exclusively perfect characters in a twenty-first-century serial. It’s so peculiar. Do people really have the same spiritual life as these heroines nowadays? Do they have principles? Some might say they’re one-sided heroines. In reply I’ll say: “So be it, I enjoy their company.”[xci]

The sentimental, if not loving contact with characters themselves in love was the series’ raison d’être, its core tenet.  An article in the The Literary Gazette compared Two Fates to the expensive mafia epic The Brigade (see below) and asked why on earth Russian critics and academics (not viewers) expressed a clear preference for the latter, much flashier serial.  The sarcasm here is pronounced: “The Brigade is more dynamic, more striking, more shocking.  But what about its ideas?  Who needs ideas in an age that has none, anyway!  We’ve got freedom!”[xcii]  Despite critics preferring visual qualities to match something Western, the cheaper, emotional clout of Two Fates